Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  A pool of light lay on the green felt like a full moon. Snuff opened a new deck. His bony fingers were so long they almost wrapped twice around the cards. He shuffled, she cut, he dealt, she asked for a card and won.

  Snuff dealt another hand, stealing a look at Carol while she contemplated her new cards. He was good at sizing up people, but this woman was not easy to know and he savored the challenge.

  “You looking for work?” Snuff asked.

  Carol glanced up from her cards. “Who, me?”

  Snuff laughed, then straightened his bow tie.

  “Oh, heavens no. I like my job at the café. This is just my day off,” she said, discarding a seven. “It’s not much of a job. I used to help Margaret Allison.…”

  “McKay’s mother?”

  “Yes,” Carol said, laying her cards down. “That Margaret had a lot of snap. Got things done. Her eyes were so bright.… There’s no one like her around here now. No one that reads books like she did. There wasn’t anything she didn’t know. She liked everything.” Carol looked at her cards again and picked up a ten of hearts. “I was there when they dug her and RJ up out of the canal. I watched them come up through that ice. I’ll never forget it. I was at Arlene’s. Remember her? She’s gone now too. She was giving me a permanent. Ever since, I’ve hated that smell.…”

  Snuff looked at her questioningly.

  “That smell of permanent. It reminds me of Margaret dying.”

  Snuff noticed her eyes were yellow and silver like a wolf’s. It was the time of year when the sun had begun falling southward and the light it cast was like her eyes—yellow and silver mixed, with the richer color dominating—and the only thing that broke the awful silence were wasps hitting against window glass and, where there were trees, the sound of frost-blackened leaves scattering.

  “Here, let me get you another one, on the house,” Snuff said, jumping up and carrying her glass to the bar. He poured himself a drink.

  Carol swiveled around in her chair. “You ought to have dances here,” she said. “It’s big enough.…”

  “We’ve had a lot of things go on here—”

  “But not during a war, I suppose.”

  “I guess not. Not yet, at least,” he said coming back to the table with the drinks.

  Carol studied her cards, then laid them face down on the green felt. “Henry Heaney … missing in action,” she said as if repeating something to herself.

  Snuff looked up. “Yes. I heard. What a shame …”

  “Did you know Carter too?”

  “Henry’s brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember him. He was the strange one. Made things very difficult for the family … always disappearing, then making up things about his life.”

  “I knew him too,” Carol said stiffly.

  Snuff looked at her, then back at the cards.

  “You’ve won again,” he said.

  “Oh, so I have.”

  They smiled at each other. The card game didn’t matter and they both knew it.

  “Another game?” Snuff asked.

  “Why not?”

  This time Carol dealt and Snuff cut the deck twice. Carol’s hand was promising. She had three queens of hearts, a four of spades, and a nine of hearts.

  “We were engaged to be married,” she blurted out.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Carter Heaney.”

  “But when? He’s been …”

  “He asked me the night he died.”

  “I’m sorry. And I apologize for what I said about him.”

  Carol waved her hand in the air as if to say it didn’t matter. “What about you, did you ever marry?”

  “I was supposed to be a priest, but I got derailed.”

  Carol sized him up. “You could have been one.” She leaned forward over her cards. “I knew someone who met the pope once. Took Communion from him. Right out of his hand.”

  “I never had that,” Snuff said.

  “Right out of his hand,” she repeated.

  When Snuff discarded, Carol leaned back in her chair.

  “Well it’s churchlike enough in here. You see, there’s the altar,” she said, pointing to the mirrored back bar. “And those are the pews. But it needs that incense.… I like the smell,” she said, surprised at how voluble she had become.

  “You should have been the priest …,” Snuff said.

  “Oh goodness no. I don’t believe in anything.”

  Snuff smiled. What was impersonal about her had given way to something else—a nervous bantering he liked.

  “I help out old Father McGuvey once in a while. Even served Communion a few weeks ago. Some of the old guard in town think it’s wrong for a bar owner to be an altar boy,” he said, smiling.

  “It makes perfect sense to me,” Carol said. “You’re in the business of serving spirits.…”

  Snuff laughed and resorted his cards. “It’s hard to make something of nothing,” he said, meaning his cards.

  “You’re lucky to believe in something,” Carol said solemnly.

  Snuff snorted. “My life’s been dictated by chance.… Do you believe in chance?” he asked.

  “You mean like this?” Carol said, laying down a royal flush.

  Snuff peered over his cards. “Yes,” he said, then caught her eyes with his.

  “Ooooooooweeee. Look at all that money!” A short man on crutches wearing a dirty Stetson appeared in the middle of the dance floor.

  “What can I do for you, Pinkey?” Snuff asked.

  “Cut me in.”

  “That’s hers,” he said flatly.

  Pinkey doffed his hat to Carol. One of the crutches fell from under his arm.

  “I need a saw,” Pinkey said.

  “What kind of drink is that?”

  Pinkey squinted hard at the man. “You’re dumber than I thought you was. What’s wrong, don’t you savvy English?”

  Snuff laughed.

  “You’ve got to get me outta this sonofabitch,” Pinkey said and swung his broken leg in the air.

  When Snuff refilled Carol’s glass Pinkey peered over the rim.

  “What’s that hummin’bird food you’re drinkin’?” he asked.

  “Here, try it,” she said.

  “Hell no, that’d clog up my pipes.”

  Carol inspected the mutilated cast. It was blotched with mud and the bottom edge was badly frayed.

  “How long have you had that on?” she asked.

  “Too long … a couple of weeks, I guess.”

  Snuff disappeared, then returned, carrying a meat saw.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Carol asked.

  “Pinkey, sit up on that table there, will you?” Snuff said. “Carol, grab his heel and kinda steady the thing.”

  Pinkey lay back on the long oak table, a relic from the neighboring town’s one lawyer, who died and whose office sat idle for twelve years. Pinkey watched as the saw sank into white plaster. Soon the cast was halved and Snuff pried it apart. They peered down at the leg.

  “God it looks wormy, don’t it?” Pinkey said. “Can’t you put that thing back on?”

  Snuff held up a piece of the cast and laughed.

  “Then get me a shot of whiskey,” Pinkey said.

  Snuff brought the drink and Pinkey gulped it down. He slid off the table slowly until both feet, the one with the boot on and the pale one covered by a sock, touched the floor. He put weight on the broken leg, then lifted it gingerly. His face turned white. He tried again. Then he looked at Snuff, and at his foot, and at Snuff again.

  “I’m healed. I’m healed,” he cried out and waved his crutches in the air like wings. He stood up. The leg held.

  “Just send me a bill, Snuff,” he said and hooked the crutches on the chandelier’s bent frame. They watched as he hobbled out the door.

  Carol Lyman turned on her heel and gasped. A man stood directly behind her. Clean-shaven, he had matted black hair, olive skin, and a dappling of black
moles—beauty spots—on his jaw.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked. He had a soft voice.

  “Carol, that’s the Wild Man,” Snuff said. “He lives out back.”

  Out back meant one of the cabins, Carol thought. She had never been inside any of them.

  The Wild Man’s face collapsed. “My dog is sick,” he said.

  Snuff put down the bar towel he had been wiping his hands with and followed the Wild Man to his cabin.

  “May I come too?” Carol asked and Snuff nodded.

  Inside, the cabin was cramped but tidy—not anything like the Wild Man’s appearance. A narrow bed had been shoved up against one wall, a steamer trunk against another and, leaning sideways, a tall bookcase crammed with miscellaneous titles: The Virginian, a set of encyclopedias, Don Quixote, everything Tolstoy had written, and a 1942 Saturday Evening Post folded back to a story called “The Bear.”

  Snuff and Carol looked at the dog who lay curled on the bed. He was a Heeler-Kelpie cross, smaller than a coyote but with a coyote’s head and ears.

  “What’s wrong?” Snuff asked, bending close to the dog. His eyes were clouded and he made a hoarse noise.

  “He’s dying,” the Wild Man said leaning helplessly against the door.

  Carol looked at the man. If he were cleaned up he’d have movie star looks, she thought, but …

  “Let’s take him in where he’ll be warm,” Snuff said, and the Wild Man gathered the dog in his arms like a child.

  Outside, Carol noticed that the afternoon was nearly gone. In the northwest dark clouds humped up and moved toward the desolation around Snuff’s. Despite heavy snows the week before, the air felt tropical and Carol thought she could smell the sea.

  “Ten years ago I found this dog in an irrigation ditch … he was just a few days old … about as big as a rat. Someone tried to drown him, but they forgot to turn the water into the ditch, I guess,” the Wild Man said as he walked down the narrow hall that opened out onto the dance floor.

  They made a soft bed for the dog under the oak table where he always liked to sleep. He gave them a grateful look. Snuff went to the porthole window and looked outside. In the distance heat lightning domed the dark sky with its ghostly hood of light and thunder exploded overhead. Then the lights in the bar went out.

  “Snuff. What’s happening?”

  Snuff pressed his face against the grimy porthole. Outside it was dark too: the neon light off, the mill dark, no moon. The door swung open. A small figure stood in the entry and did not move.

  “Come on in,” Snuff said.

  Still the visitor remained motionless.

  “Who’s there?” Snuff asked again.

  When there was no answer Snuff came out from behind the bar falling against the bottles.

  “Snuff, can’t you light a match or something?” Carol yelled. She heard a match being struck behind her, then another. The Wild Man held up a silver candelabrum.

  “Where did you get a thing like that?” Carol whispered as they approached the silent figure at the door. A wizened Japanese man appeared before them. When the light shone on his face he hid his head in his hands. Then he regained his composure.

  “They leave me. Cannot find way back. So confused,” he began.

  “Who are you?” Snuff asked.

  The old man looked at Snuff timidly but gave no answer. Snuff took the candelabrum from the Wild Man and went to the phone. The line was dead. He put back the receiver slowly.

  “Christ,” he mumbled, then rejoined the others.

  A plane flew over. It made a high, uneven whine that deepened into a drone as it veered away. Snuff and Carol looked up at the tin ceiling. Then they heard a car and two gunshots.

  “What’s going on around here?” Snuff asked. “Maybe we better find some cover for a while.”

  “Oh Snuff …,” Carol protested, but when Snuff led the old man away from the door, Carol and the Wild Man followed. They all joined the sick dog under the table.

  “Here, give me that light,” Carol said and held the candelabrum up to the old man. Under coal-black eyebrows he had an elfish face and a delicate nose. Gray hair was swept back from a long, grooved forehead.

  “Are you from the Camp?” she asked.

  “Hai. Heart Mountain. Hai,” he replied cheerfully and broke into a timid smile.

  “Mr. Abe,” he said and made a slight bow.

  “You better blow those out now,” Snuff said quietly.

  The Wild Man held the dog close. In the dark they could hear the animal’s labored breathing. Another plane droned overhead. This one was farther away.

  “War and peace,” the Wild Man whispered and chuckled at his private joke.

  In the confusion Carol’s hand touched Snuff’s under the folds of a coat he had thrown down for them and she did not move it away. They braced themselves, though for what they weren’t sure: for a Japanese army to burst in, for sudden death. Snuff positioned himself so he could see out the porthole at the end of the bar. Beyond the bent geranium the sky was a blank.

  Carol leaned back against the table’s thick pedestal. It was like a tree, she thought, the trunk curved and smooth, and branching into a sheltering canopy. For a moment the window went white with lightning. A clap of thunder jangled the chandelier’s crystal prisms. Carol imagined she was on a boat. Wind whistled and the air slipping under the door into the stale room smelled of a failing sun and seaweed.

  They waited. Each tried to comfort the dog, passing him from lap to lap. When the dog was passed to the old man Carol whispered, “He’s just old. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Then she looked at the man again. “Where did you relocate from, Mr. Abe?” she asked.

  “Los Angeles. I was flower grower. Then had to come here. Plant garden. No good, no grow,” he said forlornly.

  The Wild Man looked at him. “Nothing grows here,” he said dryly.

  Mr. Abe gave back the dog.

  The night was divided by long silences and short interludes of whispered talk. Snuff spoke first. He told of an upbringing in the mining town of Butte.

  “I worked for Marcus Daley. He owned just about everything in Anaconda and Butte. Besides the mines he had a big hotel. It was quite a place. Everything in it was made of copper—even the toilet seats. All kinds of people came through: boxers, opera singers, movie stars, gangsters. They said Butte was an island of easy money entirely surrounded by whiskey. I was an orphan. My dad died in the mines. Oh, death was common. One man died every day in those mines; the cemetery held forty thousand. Money was easy; death was easy. I guess it was living that got to be hard.

  “I grew up on Venus Alley. Do you know what that was? A whole street of whorehouses. When Mr. Daley put me to work I didn’t have a dime. He taught me something about making money. I even had a little string of racehorses all my own. Then I lost them in a poker game. And in exchange I got this place.”

  Snuff paused and looked at his surroundings, then laughed.

  “I told Carol earlier that I was supposed to be a priest.” He looked around. “But things happen; things get lost along the way. This is my hardship post.”

  When Snuff finished talking, no one spoke. The rumbling of the Wild Man’s stomach broke the spell. Carol smothered a laugh, then crawled on hands and knees behind the bar. She returned with a handful of elk jerky and four pickled eggs, shared by all. The Wild Man broke his egg in half and gave the yolk to his dog.

  “What about you?” Carol asked, looking at the Wild Man.

  His eyes bounced like dark berries when he smiled, but he didn’t speak.

  “He fell out of a boxcar from a moving train one night,” Snuff interjected, looking at the young man. “When I found him his ears were frostbit. Had to have old Doc Hoffman up here to cut them off.”

  Carol found herself staring at the Wild Man’s head as Snuff talked, but the long matted hair hid the ears.

  “Snuff took me in,” the Wild Man said. A silence followed.

  Carol looked
at him intently. “Is that all?”

  “After I healed up and spring came I worked as an irrigator. Up on the Heaney place, then down here on that Mormon farm. That’s back when they ran their livestock together … back when they were true socialists.…”

  “Tell her about the Depression,” Snuff urged.

  The Wild Man stared at him. “We wore rags. Like everyone else,” he said flatly.

  “We’d drive around in the middle of the night and deliver boxes of food he put together on people’s doorsteps. Clothes too and books … lots of books,” Snuff said.

  “I was just the chauffeur; that’s all.”

  “Like hell you were …,” Snuff said.

  “I liked irrigating. It’s child’s play. There was a coyote who used to follow my pup around … walk right behind him about fifteen feet.…”

  “But what about before? Where did you come from?” Carol asked.

  The Wild Man stroked his dog adoringly. “Before?” he asked. “Before that I went to college … in Cambridge … Harvard. One day I came home from classes and my house had been robbed. Then I looked out on the streets and I knew why. It was the thirties. I had lots of things and other people had nothing. I left my door open and walked back to school and told them I was leaving. That night I hopped a freight. It was full of hoboes—guys my age too. When I returned, my parents, who had been wealthy, had lost everything. I wanted to spare them the embarrassment of having an extra mouth to feed, so I took off again and landed here.”

  The small dog groaned, stretched his back legs, and collapsed again in the Wild Man’s lap. Snuff looked through the window. Two stars shone, then one was overtaken by clouds.

  “I wonder what’s happening out there,” Snuff said.

  The Wild Man looked at him. “Nothing. Same as usual.”

  A long silence followed. Then Carol Lyman said, “What about you, Mr. Abe?”

  The old man’s eyebrows rose and he looked timidly at her. “Oh no, is no very good story.”

  “All stories are good,” she said.

  He looked from one to the other. “I come on ship. I’m opposite him,” he said and pointed to the Wild Man. “Start out with nothing. Come here to make money. Before—mask-carver in Noh theater. Kyoto. Master died. Then I come here.” He paused and pursed his lips.